Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

That this House takes note of the Strategic Defence Review 2025.

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, I am looking forward to listening later in the debate to my colleague and noble friend Lord McCabe make his maiden speech.

Unusually, I will start my speech today with my conclusion. After a full year examining, consulting, challenging, inspecting and intently looking at every aspect of the defence of this country, and bearing in mind the difficult world that we live in and have to survive in, this is what I firmly believe: we are underinsured; we are underprepared; we are not safe. This country and its people are not safe. The British people are faced with a world in turmoil, with great-power competition now spilling over into conflict, with constant grey-zone attacks on our mainland, and with Russia—often with the co-operation of Iran, China and North Korea—challenging the existing world order. We in this country are simply not safe.

This review outlines graphically the threats that we face and describes our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but it also—I emphasise that this is crucial—charts the way in which we can recreate the war readiness which alone will guarantee deterrence and safety for the future. The 62 time-specified recommendations in the report are the very minimum that we need to ensure that the country and our people will be properly safe in the future. That is why, in the report, we call for a national conversation in the country about defence and security, and the Prime Minister has endorsed that view. It has to be led from the top, and there must be no restraint on military and other people articulating the case to the country.

I acknowledge, as a long-time politician, that defence is still not sufficiently high in the people’s priorities. They rightly worry about the cost of living—a lot of which has to do with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—welfare, education and the National Health Service. Denis Healey, who I used to work with, said in 1969:

“Once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/3/1969; col. 551.]


All of us have an obligation now to change public opinion.

I preface what more I have to say about the review with some words of thanks. First, I thank the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary for entrusting my excellent colleagues, General Richard Barrons and Dr Fiona Hill, and me to do an external review of the nation’s defence. It was a pretty bold move of theirs. This is my second strategic defence review, but the access we had to the Ministry of Defence, its people and its information allowed us to be both radical and profound in our 62 recommendations, and then to have the endorsement of the Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the whole Government in accepting it.

Secondly, I put on record my thanks to the many experts who assisted us in this historic endeavour. Working with the three reviewers was the defence review team, six non-partisan experts with us the whole way: Robin Marshall, Ed Dinsmore, Grace Cassy, Jean-Christophe Gray, Angus Lapsley and finally, and importantly, Sir Jeremy Quin, who was one of the best Defence Procurement Ministers in the last Conservative Government. In addition to them, over 150 experts were involved in the review and challenge process, which was a crucial way of capturing and interrogating external views. We are grateful to all of them. I pay fulsome credit to the talented team who worked with us on this review, led by Ayaaz Nawab, Group Captain Matthew Radnall and our chief drafter, Ashlee Godwin. We had a staff of truly remarkable and dedicated people assisting us in this mission. They made a pivotal contribution to a review which, I am confident, will intimidate our enemies, inspire our friends, invigorate our defence industry and make our country safer. They can be proud of what they have done, and we are proud of them.

This is a truly transformational review. It does not tinker with the issues, gloss over deficiencies, or just marginally improve on business as usual. Our adversaries have given up business as usual, and we must do so as well. Over the years, we have allowed our forces and defences to become hollowed out. When we say in the report that we are unprepared, it is an understatement. We do not have the ammunition, the training, the people, the spare parts or the logistics, and we do not have the medical capacity to deal with the mass casualties that we would face if we were involved in high-intensity warfare.

Over the years—I suppose I must plead guilty to this as well—we took a substantial peace dividend, because we all believed that the world had changed for the better; that the values of liberal democracy had been cemented into our societies; that war between nations was outmoded; and that our military forces would be needed only for short-term, distant interventions. Sadly, we were not alone in that.

It may have been overoptimism, or at worst wishful thinking, but the brutal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia three years ago was a savage wake-up call for all of us. This world we now live in has changed out of all recognition, and we have got to change as well. This review, comprehensive and detailed as it is, is therefore designed to bolster deterrence, both conventional and nuclear, by rebuilding war-fighting readiness. With a combination of homeland resilience, a new integrated force and new command structure, and by putting NATO first, we will, we believe, be safer at home and more influential abroad.

We ruthlessly examined every aspect of defence, and the review challenges preconceived notions and habits for the very different world that we now live in. We have concluded that we need a strong digital foundation and an effective digital targeting web, which underpins the lethality and agility of our forces across all five domains.

We propose a new, reinvigorated partnership with the defence industry, capturing innovation at wartime pace. With a powerful new national armaments director shaking up our procurement process we will ensure, therefore, that our fighting forces have the modern equipment that they need, on time and on budget.

The review proposes a major boost to the reserves and the cadets. It reinvigorates and modernises training, it tackles the chronic troop accommodation problems that we have, and it deals with the recruitment shortfalls with innovative new ideas. It confronts—this is important—peacetime cultures of risk aversion, lack of trust and bureaucracy. Importantly, it will capture the innovations that we all see emerging from the experience of Ukraine.

Indeed, the lessons of Ukraine do not just lie in the impressive ingenuity and tenacity of the Ukrainian people and their leaders. Britain has been in the forefront of helping Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invaders. We should make no mistake at all that if Putin prevails in subjugating his neighbour, we will all pay a heavy price. I dealt with Vladimir Putin on a number of occasions when I was in NATO. He once stood beside me and said: “Ukraine is a sovereign independent nation which will make its own decisions about peace and security”. He is now a threat not just to Ukraine but to the whole of western Europe. We have already supported Ukraine substantially, and it remains at the very heart of this review.

One of the most important recommendations that we make in the review is that defence has to be a whole-of-society matter. In a world where the homeland is already under attack, with our critical national infrastructure on a knife-edge, where over 95% of our international data comes from threatened undersea cables and 77% of our gas supplies come in one single pipeline, we cannot simply contract out our defences to the people in uniform. We need to learn the lessons of Finland, Sweden and Norway in obliging all of us to know our individual and collective roles in protecting our nation.

Let me address the question which I am pretty confident is going to be at the core of the speeches that come later in the debate. Is there the money for what we propose? I believe that there is and that there has to be, and the Prime Minister knows that as well. In the national security strategy, which was published only a few days ago, the Prime Minister says under his own name:

“That is why, as part of this strategy, we make a historic commitment to spend 5% of our GDP on national security by 2035”.


There are no qualifications or caveats involved in that statement. In the Commons, on 2 June, the Defence Secretary, John Healey, said,

“take it from the Prime Minister when he said that we will spend what is needed to deliver this review”.

He added:

“The vision of this strategic defence review now becomes the mission of this Government to deliver”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/6/25; col. 62.]


There is no messing in what either of them said, and there will be no messing in what the reviewers hold them to account on.

Finally, I say to Members of this House, who will all travel home after this debate in peace and safety, that three and a half years ago the European citizens of Bucha, Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine also walked their European streets in peace and safety. Then came the sudden, unprovoked invasion by Putin’s Russia and with it the depraved violence of the Russian occupiers. In an instant they were not safe, at peace or free. Ordinary European people in ordinary European streets were doing ordinary things, until they were not. That is a warning for us all.

The British people need, more than ever in my lifetime, the renewed defence insurance that this review promises. Those of us, including in this House, who know the dangers and the answer must make the case with the people and decisively win that argument. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble friend Lord McCabe on his striking maiden speech. We look forward to hearing more from him in the future. He comes from Port Glasgow, like the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie. Admiral West—the noble Lord, Lord West—comes from Clydebank, and I come from Dunoon, so the Firth of Clyde has become the new deep state in the House of Lords.

Secondly, I understand that the contribution by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol, early in the debate, was her last speech in the House of Lords. Although she did not classify it as a valedictory, it actually was the last speech. On behalf of all Members of the House, I thank her for her service to the House and wish her well in her retirement.

I turn to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy. The Minister has dealt with him, and we welcome him back in this brief episode today. He was uncharacteristically unkind to the review by saying that it had no poetry in it. One of the characteristics of this review is that it is extremely well written. It reads well, even for the non-expert.

The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, came up to me the other day in Millbank House to say that he had read it completely. He said that it was very impressive, very readable and very effective, and, “There is not a single split infinitive in it”. So there we have the judgment of the former Archbishop of York on it. It really has been beautifully drafted, to make sure that we get the message over. We are passionate about the issues, warnings and threats and the need for what will have to be done, but our concern was that it had to be said in a language that people outside of this bubble could understand, and that has been done. I paid a tribute earlier to our chief drafter, Ashlee Godwin, who works for the House of Commons Library. She was the brain behind the readability.

We have talked about the money. I dealt with that at the beginning, and I believe that the Prime Minister has made it clear exactly what will have to be done. But the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, made an interesting point. He said that it is not about whether there is enough money or whether it will be executed, but that the question is: do we mean it? That is an important question. We are telling the British people that they are not safe. We are telling them that we are underprepared, and that we collectively have left them underprepared. They are underinsured, because defence expenditure is the insurance policy of the nation against the future. We need to get that in place and win that argument as well.

Sir Basil Liddell Hart, a great strategist of the Second World War, once said that the outcome of the battle is more likely to be determined

“in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men”.

Deterrence is therefore a matter of psychology. It is a matter of persuading any adversary, whoever that adversary might be—and there are adversaries out there—that we will defend ourselves, our nation and our values. That is what this report is about. It is a warning that we are not safe but also a prescription for how we can be safer in the future.

If the question, “Is there a threat?”, has to be asked, you have only to watch the television every night to see what is happening in Ukraine. Of course, I dealt with Vladimir Putin in the good days. I am one of the few people still alive who can stand by an open window and talk about Vladimir Putin’s sense of humour—something that seems to have completely disappeared as the megalomania has taken over. That is what it represents.

In many ways, Ukraine is the last war. We keep talking about how people are fascinated and obsessed by the last war, not the next war. Ukraine might be the last war. The next war will be nastier and more brutal, and we need to be ready for it. We must try, through building deterrence and war-readiness, to deter any future adversary from taking on the British nation, because the costs of war will always be much greater than the costs of preventing it and building deterrence.

That is what this review is all about, and we need to get that message over to the British people so that it becomes a much more important issue for them. It will be too late if the lights go out, the hospitals close, the data centres melt because the air conditioning has been turned off, and the people turn on us collectively and say, “Why the hell didn’t you do something about it before now?” This is a warning, but that warning has to be heeded. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.

Strategic Defence Review

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

Can I apologise? I always forget this, and if the standards people come after me, I am really sorry; I should have mentioned that my son-in-law is in the reserves. I apologise to the House for not stating again that my son-in-law is an active member of the reserves.

On the ability to produce the number of submarines the noble Baroness mentioned, she will know there has been huge investment in Barrow in order to be able to deliver. There is now dual-line production, which will mean the ability to produce more submarines at speed will be possible. That sort of adaption and need for investment shows the fact that, over a period of time, we have allowed the sovereign manufacturing capability of this country to develop the defence equipment it needs perhaps to not have the priority it deserves. One of the things my noble friend Lord Robertson’s report says is that we need to ensure we have a sovereign capability to produce the equipment and munitions we need. Submarines will be part of that.

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to make a contribution and ask a question. I have spent 10 months answering questions, so there is a slight difficulty involved in that. I ask my noble friend the Minister whether in future, to this House and the public outside, he will emphasise the fact that this was not a Labour defence review? It was designed specifically to be a strategic review that would incorporate other elements of the country. Not only did we consult as many people as we could—we got 8,000 submissions through our invitation—but I asked a former distinguished Conservative Minister for defence procurement, Sir Jeremy Quin, to be part of our team. Throughout the whole of that, he was of invaluable assistance.

This report is not simply about warships and missiles. It is about reforming the whole way in which we deliver defence. After all, defence expenditure is the premium we spend for an insurance policy, not only for the current generation but for generations to come. I hope that is something Ministers will be making clear to the outside world.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I think my noble friend has just demonstrated why the report has been such a success. There may be things that divide people in this Chamber. There may be debates to be had, and quite genuine disagreements. I have always said, and I have always tried to reflect as a Minister of State for the Ministry of Defence, that that is a real privilege. It is predicated on the basis that I do not believe that anyone in this House wishes to undermine the defence and security of our nation. We all have that at the front of our minds. My noble friend is right to point out that the public should understand that. We believe that we have the interests of our country and of our alliances—of our friends and allies—at the forefront of our minds.

My noble friend’s remark about the fact that the right honourable Sir Jeremy Quin has been involved in the review is a good example of that cross-party support. I also know that, in my time in this office, the noble Earl, Lord Minto, the noble Baronesses, Lady Goldie and Lady Smith, and many others, including the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, through his responsibility as chair of the International Relations and Defence Committee, have contributed, along with many of my noble friends who have experience. That brings together a wealth of experience and talent that can only make any report better.

On the noble Lord’s last point, an important point needs to be made. It is not only about the amount of money that we spend; we have to be clearer about what we spend it on in order to meet the threats of the future. That is an important point that the report makes as well.

Strategic Defence Review

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Strategic Defence Review.

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, after the election in July, I was asked by the Secretary of State for Defence and the Prime Minister to lead a team of three to do a unique strategic defence review, working with, but not to, the Ministry of Defence. I was delighted—I think that is the word—to accept this task. I am here today to give Members of this House the opportunity to offer a view on what should be in that review and how Members of the House might want it to conclude.

This debate today will add to and contribute to the 14,500 submissions made so far to the secretariat of the review. They have come from the services themselves, from other government departments, from academia, from think tanks, from industry, from our allies and from the public. It is, quite frankly, an unprecedented exercise in participation in one of the most important issues of our time. I am working on this historic endeavour, as reviewer, with General Sir Richard Barrons, who was the chief of Joint Forces and previously deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, and we have been joined by Dr Fiona Hill, formerly a senior official with the United States National Security Council and presently chancellor of the University of Durham.

We are the three reviewers, but we have been assisted in this exercise by a defence review team of six experts, including an assistant Secretary-General of NATO, and by Sir Jeremy Quin, the well-regarded and well-respected former Conservative Defence Minister and former chair of the Commons Defence Select Committee. This is, therefore, emphatically not a Labour defence review; it is the British effort to ensure that the United Kingdom is secure at home and strong abroad. Its terms of reference and the instructions to the review have been publicised and are on the GOV.UK website. I am sure that all Members of the House have carefully consulted them all before the session this afternoon.

As noble Lords will know, this is not the first strategic defence review that I have led. I did it in 1997 and 1998, which was, after all, only 26 years ago. It is worth reflecting that at that time we had 20,000 troops either in Northern Ireland or preparing to be in Northern Ireland. We had just signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act—I still have the cufflinks that were made to commemorate that—China was in the shadows and globalisation was hailed as a prosperity machine. There was no perceived danger to the British homeland at that point. That world has gone and it has gone for ever. So too have the subsequent worlds that were looked at and examined by reviews since then.

I have been reminding people that, when I concluded the review, I said that if it was a success it would be known as the SDR 1998, but that if it was a failure it would be known as the Robertson review. I am delighted to announce that it is commonly—universally—known as the SDR 1998.

This country now has to contend with a volatile and complex world of great power competition, with a war in Europe initiated unprovoked against a peaceful neighbour by a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with a horrific conflict ongoing in the Middle East and with enduring challenges to do with climate, grey zone attacks, nuclear proliferation, global inequality and greater mineral competition—and from the same failed and fragile states. It is a formidable cocktail for us to contend with.

This review must therefore chart the reset of defence, dictated by these factors, if we are going to keep our country safe and secure. There will, of course, inevitably be choices in any review. Some of them will be hard choices indeed, but they will have to be made, and denial of the problems is not among the choices that we have today. The purpose of the review is clearly set out: to make sure UK defence has not only the capabilities required but the new roles and reforms in place to meet the challenges faced by the nation and the world.

NATO is the bedrock for the review. As the first and, as yet, maybe the only person to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty myself, I know the value and importance of our NATO allies and their strength. They, too, like our adversaries, acknowledge and value our independent nuclear deterrent, which will remain a central feature of UK defence.

As I told the 300 top officials in the Ministry of Defence just two weeks ago, there can be no business as usual in defence. There is no business as usual among our adversaries and our potential adversaries, and there can be no business as usual for us. We dare not do it. Therefore, we are interested in the views of Members of the House, as distinguished people with expertise and background. I look forward to listening to those views today and I give your Lordships the promise that they will be taken account of in the review and its challenge process, which is being undertaken at the moment, involving some distinguished Members of this House. That process will make a contribution to the recommendations that the review will ultimately make to both the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister, in the interests of a strong and enduring defence policy for this country. I look forward to listening to this debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, tempted as I am to intervene in this debate to answer some of the points that have been made—or even to endorse the concept of me putting on my Islay boots and doing something violent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—I am going to restrain myself, because this was designed as a listening exercise. It was an opportunity for Members of the House of Lords to have a say and to have those views then incorporated into the process that we are undertaking at present. As I said, 14,500 submissions have already been made, some of them very substantial and a lot of them coming from organisations with different views. They will be considered properly and so will the outcome of this Grand Committee.

During the last review that I did, as part of the consultations that took place we had a dinner in Admiralty House for former Defence Ministers. I had the privilege of sitting around the table with Denis Healey, Peter Carington, George Younger and a number of other Ministers who had served in the Ministry of Defence in order to hear their views about defence. It was a very rich experience and a very entertaining evening, which largely involved anecdotes about gifts that people had received—always an entertaining subject for Ministers and former Ministers, it has to be said.

At the end of it, Lord Carrington got up and said: “We thank you very much for the opportunity of coming along this evening. We’ve all enjoyed the dinner and the conversations about it but frankly, in terms of the defence review, you’re much closer to the subject than we are, so we’re going to leave it to you—and once you’ve reported, we’ll attack it”. To avoid that fate, I thought it would be useful to have this debate in the Grand Committee. Much has been gained from it and members of the review will certainly be reading the debate with enormous interest. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.

King’s Speech

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friends who have made the transition from Opposition to Government swiftly and highly successfully. They are good, clever people and the country and its defence are in good hands.

Secondly, I have to make an apology. On 25 April this year, I asked a question in the House of the noble Earl, Lord Minto, and inadvertently omitted to preface my question with a reference to my main entry in the register of interests. I apologise to the House for that error and refer today to my current and more innocent entry.

As many noble Lords have said, the gracious Speech says that

“my Government will conduct a Strategic Defence Review”.

As so many have already said, the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Defence have asked me to lead that review, along with General Sir Richard Barrons and Dr Fiona Hill. With great pleasure, we have agreed to do that.

This will be my second strategic defence review but probably the more difficult. The world has changed dramatically since the last one in 1998 and, in the intervening period, the range of challenges, threats, complications, instabilities and fragilities has multiplied. The sheer volatility of events in the world today has combined with the velocity of dynamic change to produce new vulnerabilities in our society. We must all face that new global turbulence with serious intent. Therefore, our Armed Forces must be agile, lethal, survivable and robust enough to deter any threat to our country. That is the imperative.

I do not intend to give a running commentary during the period of the review. After all, we are out to listen and consider, but not yet to proclaim. I just make two brief points. First, we invite the maximum input to our review, including from parliamentarians. I am conscious that Select Committees of both Houses will not be able to give us an early submission, but they will be taken into account. What we mainly seek in this review, from all people, are solutions and frankness about the choices before us. We all know the problems. However, we need honesty about the answers and the trade-offs that are involved in confronting these problems, and we would like to hear all views on that. Send your views to [e-mail].

Secondly, we and the country need to recognise that the threats to our country and citizens are no longer theoretical. They are no longer a distant possibility. They are alive and well in Ukraine today. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has brutally invaded and sought to occupy a peaceful neighbouring independent sovereign nation state. Anybody who needs reminding of what is at stake in the world today needs look only at the depraved conduct of Putin’s occupiers in those parts of the Donbass and Crimea that they presently and temporarily occupy. In that changed world, we have to look afresh at how we keep our people safe from that grim reality and other deadly and disruptive threats—not just now but for decades to come. It is a daunting task for this review, but I hope that we will help point a way towards a more secure and safer future.