The UK Prime Minister’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review, of which I was one of the leaders, has three major themes.
First, the UK – like every country – has passed from the comfortable post-Cold War era into a multi-polar world of accelerating state level confrontation and conflict. In place of managing risks (such as terrorism) that were important but essentially marginal, we face potentially existential-level threats to our national security and prosperity.
Second, not just the armed forces but also government, civil society and industry reflect more than 30 years without facing great peril. Wars only happened far away, easily outsourced to small professional forces to manage. Now war may trample the homeland, so a ‘whole of society’ effort in resilience, mobilisation and endurance is needed again.
Third, there is a good way out of this. It involves the greatest transformation of defence for around 150 years based on applying Digital Age technology, organisation and method. This is how to sustain deterrence based on the credible ability to fight, in a collective arrangement with allies - principally NATO. Done well, it supports export-led growth.
This is not going to be as cheap as 2% GDP and it will also be more expensive as the US understandably subsidises the security of 500 million prosperous Europeans much less. We still agonise over the marginal cost of deterrence hovering around 3.5 to 5% of GDP, but if the price of undercooking deterrence is war, that comes in at around 50% of GDP, the destruction of modern war and all the death and injury that scars at least three generations.
We must make the SDR prescription work. A lot of this obviously falls to the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces. Building the Digital Targeting Web (or Kill Web to most people) by 2027 and establishing the path to a dynamic blend of crewed, uncrewed and autonomous capability at sea, on land and in the air are core military challenges.
The MoD has spent the summer converting the strategic direction of the Review into a detailed and affordable programme, whilst concurrently reorganising top-down, sustaining current operations and thinking about the potential implications of whatever happens next in Ukraine. It has its hands full.
As the SDR makes clear, none of this change is possible without a completely new MoD partnership with innovation and industry. A new National Armaments Director is going to be appointed to drive this and now would be a good time.
However, very little of what the MoD plans to do is yet well known to its partners in finance and industry, and defence funding until 2027 is extraordinarily tight. The positive narrative of the SDR has been accompanied by a severe squeeze of current activity. This feeds the scepticism-trending-cynicism in some corners that SDR 2025 said good and necessary things beyond the capacity and competence of the MoD and the armed forces to actually deliver.
This cannot be. The UK must make the changes the Prime Minister has endorsed because failing to do so will render this country comprehensively vulnerable to unacceptably steep risks. The UK is already attacked below the threshold of military conflict every day in cyberspace, against vital undersea cables and much else. We can argue whether the intent to attack the UK at military level exists today, it’s not obvious, but the capability to do so certainly does - and intent can change overnight.
The MoD does not know as much as the people who live it every day about commercial investment, world-changing innovation in billions of dollars, or how industrial acquisition keeps pace in a profoundly competitive environment. So just waiting for the MoD and the Service Chiefs to tell the rest of us how this new partnership is going to work could take much longer than we can safely wait and may disappoint.
We need to provoke much more of a discussion: leaders and experts in the private sector must take their thinking to Defence about how things could work. Not to harassed mid-level MoD programme managers, but as big ideas to the very top, including the dominant hands on the Defence tiller in Number 10 and the Treasury. A ‘whole of society’ partnership created by dialogue not announcement will see existing defence funding spent more productively and secure massive private funding for defence outcomes in new ways.
The time for this conversation is now, and not only because of the post-SDR process. As things stand, the forecast for UK defence spending will get us to a much better place over the next 10 years. What if the world doesn’t give us 10 years? Getting the ’whole of society’ partnership going now means we will be ready to move faster together when it becomes necessary, and live much less vulnerable to avoidable defeat and hardship.
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