Strategic Defence Review

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, when I spoke in the foreign policy and defence debate on the gracious Speech a few weeks ago, I welcomed the Government’s intention to hold a strategic defence review and to do so quickly. I remarked on the nature of the three defence reviews of which I had the most intimate knowledge—those of 2010, 2015 and 2020—and offered that those three reviews had three things in common.

First, they all had a superficially compelling narrative, one that gave a fairly sobering analysis of the increasing risks to the stability of the world order and the growing diversity of both the defence and security challenges to that order. The second thing was the reality of government austerity. All three reviews were ultimately the product of financial, rather than geostrategic, reality. The third thing, therefore, was that all three reviews delivered a delusion that various alchemies—modernisation, efficiency, technological superiority and fusion doctrine—somehow facilitated an ability to take acceptable risk because, in the end, everything would turn out all right and be okay.

The result of these serial delusions has now been exposed. The International Relations and Defence Committee’s recent report on the lessons for UK defence from Ukraine, brutally but fairly, lays bare the somewhat alarming state of not just our Armed Forces but the machinery of government, the defence industry and wider society’s ability to deter or sustain a conventional war at scale.

The defence review currently under way cannot, therefore, come quickly enough, but it needs to be a review quite unlike its most recent forerunners. It cannot be a cost-capped exercise in public and self-delusion; rather, it must be an honest exercise in self-scrutiny and geopolitical reality. I realise that, ultimately, money will have to be a factor. As long as the review has integrity, it does not necessarily lead to an uncomfortable outcome. Indeed, it might be quite a liberating exercise. To me, the outcome of the review should be a justified choice from which all else flows.

The choice is the strategic one of what role we, the United Kingdom, want to play in the world over the next 10 to 20 years. I do not think that this is a simplistic choice between doing everything or nothing. The nation would not understand or tolerate a wholly extreme departure from our current aspirations. Rather, it is a more nuanced choice between two more subtle options—but it is a very distinct choice.

The context is the increasingly darkening world in which we no longer have a monopoly on the ownership of truth. It is a world in which China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are increasingly mutually self-supporting and in which many of the countries of the poorly defined global South are, at best, undecided as to whom they favour.

One choice is to double down on what we have traditionally aspired to be as a nation—a global leader. It would involve us in a meaningful leadership role in NATO, necessitate a significant investment in restoring conventional deterrence in Europe, require a significant investment in resilience, necessitate the recreation of the mechanisms for generating reserves, involve continued or even greater investment in cyberspace and emerging technologies, and involve us in some more demanding global roles of which AUKUS and GCAP are perhaps the capability forerunners. This would be the more expensive option and would bring its own forms of risk and benefit on the global stage.

A second option is more modest but, some may argue, more rational. It would involve coming to terms with a reduced global ambition and accepting that there are limits to where we envisage projecting force. It would focus on the regional threat from Russia and, more specifically, it might choose to exploit the mutual synergies and interests we enjoy with the nations of the Joint Expeditionary Force. Our maritime and air forces could form the core of a meaningful contribution to the security of the north Atlantic and northern Europe. It might recognise that expeditionary land forces, at scale, looks a highly questionable ambition for a nation that cannot man an army of 72,000 and that has no current mechanisms to mobilise a reserve.

But we do have the ability to exploit space and cyber special force operations, and we retain a practised understanding of high-level command and control. This more modest option would also need to recognise our deficiencies in layered anti-missile defence and offensive missile capability. The latter may provide the necessary escalatory gearing to restore credibility to our strategic deterrent.

I do not want to give the impression that this second option necessarily generates any savings against the current or anticipated budget. It would, however, demand some markedly different capability choices. My point is that the capability choices would be the result of the decisions about our strategic ambition. I fear that, in the past, capability choices have predetermined the policy aspiration, which must be the wrong way around.

My plea is for a review of integrity, not one based on hope, boosterism or doctrinal alchemy. I would certainly be cautious of an alchemy based on the idea of an integrated force fighting an unfair war on the presumption of perpetual technological advantage. To me, such an outcome has some of the hallmarks of a delusion in waiting.