A new SDR must not repeat the mistakes of 1998

In July 1998 George Robertson, Tony Blair’s first Secretary of State for Defence, published The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) some 14 months after the start of the review and 8 months late. Labour’s 1997 election manifesto had committed the party to holding a defence review which would re-establish a direct link between foreign policy and defence policy. Furthermore, Robertson argued that the United Kingdom should adopt the US Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) model: a defence review every parliament to ensure that defence continued to link policy to strategy.

Robertson has subsequently claimed that the proof of the SDR’s quality was that his name was not attached to it unlike the reviews conducted by previous Defence Secretaries, e.g. Sandys, Healey, Mason and Nott. Unlike these earlier and controversial reviews Robertson’s showed how it should be done.

Another indication of enduring success might be that the current government, the opposition parties, Britain’s armed forces and several think-tanks have all called for what they have chosen to call a ‘new SDR’ (RUSI have called for a ‘a Future Defence Review’, but presumably not for much longer). The notion that the 1998 SDR process was the model for defence reviews and that its result was some sort of higher consciousness in defence thinking, is beginning to wear thin.

In a number of ways SDR was successful. It banished the ghost of Labour’s unilateralist past for a decade and gained the support of policy-makers, the armed forces and the academic establishment centred on the Centre for the King’s College Centre for Defence Studies and RUSI. The SDR also allowed Labour to use defence as a mechanism for re-engaging in the European debate whilst covering up the party’s divisions over Europe. Moreover, it allowed government to avoid making any difficult defence choices such as the balance between the transatlantic partnership and Europe by promising to be all things to all allies (and perhaps even all adversaries).

Inevitably the chickens would come home to roost. To square all the equipment demands being made of it, the assumptions informing the SDR can best be described as optimistic in the extreme. As a result defence policy has struggled to meet these competing challenges and the armed forces are now living with SDR’s legacy ­— a vacuum in policy, a series of acquisition programmes that are in various states of collapse and armed forces ill-prepared for the wars in which they find themselves engaged.

Nevertheless, the mythologies that surround the original document remain in place. The QDR idea was quickly forgotten as indeed were annual defence estimates. The 2002 SDR: A New Chapter sought to adapt SDR to a post 9/11 world without any real policy substance whilst Delivering Security in a Changing World, the two defence policy documents from 2003-4 which sought to update SDR, had so little impact that the first edition of Labour’s National Security Strategy produced by the Cabinet Office failed to even acknowledge their existence.

So what were the major flaws in the SDR? The first two mistakes of the review were to avoid any difficult question and seek to curry favour with Britain’s defence establishment. As a result, difficult questions about the future character of war and the implications of the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’, then being debated in the United States, were quietly covered in less than one page of the annex and essentially ignored.

Notions of asymmetric and non-conventional warfare were similarly ignored. Instead, the armed forces were encouraged to plan for wars past — a second 1991 style Gulf War or further Bosnian style operations in the Balkans. The three services were therefore able to argue in favour of their traditional capabilities which effectively meant the Royal Navy successfully arguing for a new generation of large aircraft carriers, the Army insisting on the FRES armoured vehicle programme and the RAF protecting the Eurofighter.

In simple terms, the mood of the SDR was to pay little attention to shaping the armed forces for the future and to buy off each of the three services with the most expensive and glamorous equipment, irrespective of cost or need.

The third major flaw was that of funding. Not only did the SDR promise to maintain Britain’s existing commitments supported by increasingly costly equipment programmes, it planned to do so with less money than the previous administration had planned for defence; a result of the switching of public funding to other priority areas such as health and education.

To cover this gap the SDR made a series of financial assumptions that could at best be described as financially naïve. First, it assumed that defence spending as a percentage of GDP would remain constant for the foreseeable future, and this despite the first wave of Brown cuts. Any cursory analysis of trends in defence spending for the previous forty years would have shown that defence spending in relationship to GDP had been in an almost constant state of decline irrespective of political party with no evidence to suggest this was likely to change.

Second, the SDR proposed to reform the procurement of equipment by the adoption of Smart Procurement (later changed to Smart Acquisition) so that defence would finally begin to buy equipment to time and to price. Again any cursory examination of previous defence reviews (the Nott review apart) would have shown that these reviews had made the same assumption and had failed miserably.

Third, the SDR assumed that a 20 per cent saving could be made in the defence logistical organisation’s costs by reducing equipment holdings and seeking improved efficiency. Finally, the SDR was predicated on the idea that further moves towards joint forces would also save money. However, the reality of force mergers, costly procedures in their own right, has tended to mean that the military opt for the highest rather than the lowest common denominator, thus preventing real savings. For example responsibility for bringing the Royal Navy’s Sea Harrier squadrons into line with the crewing practices of the RAF moved from Lieutenant Commanders to full Commanders.

The flaws in these funding assumptions were already clear by 2003 when Delivering Security in a Changing World sought to plug the financial hole by procurement delays and the trimming of programmes. This measure, arguably, is the cause of the shortage of helicopters in Afghanistan today. Nevertheless, the government remained in denial, signing up for a new strategic nuclear deterrent in 2006 and arguing that they were tightening their grip on costs. Finally, Bob Ainsworth, Brown’s third Defence Minister in less than 2 years, announced in July 2009 that there would be a new Strategic Defence Review but not until the next parliament.

If SDR is to be repeated then what can we look forward to? If the previous SDR is anything to go by the 2010 review will avoid any difficult decisions and ignore any analysis which produces awkward conclusions. If it keeps to type, the 2010 SDR will be characterised by an absence of policy and by ever more creative accounting assumptions, all of which will mean equipment delays and reductions in personnel numbers on an unprecedented scale.